Who really blew up the Kerch Bridge?

Who blew up the Kerch bridge? One of President Zelensky’s most senior advisers, Mikhailo Podolyak, has suggested that the Russians did it themselves. 'Isn’t it obvious who made an explosion?' he asked on Twitter. 'Truck arrived from RF (Russian Federation).' Officially, the Ukrainian government is saying nothing: its secret service has said it will remain quiet until after the war. Zelensky himself has so far refrained from commenting on the attack, except to say that the 'weather has been cloudy in Crimea.'

If indeed they were responsible, why would the Ukrainians not claim responsibility for a sabotage attack of high sophistication that caused widespread jubilation in Ukraine and across the world? The answer may lie in the details of the attack’s planning and execution that have emerged on anonymous, pro-Kremlin channels of the Telegram messenger and news service. 

According to the '112' Telegram channel, quoting Russian police sources, the truck that exploded on the bridge was driven by one Makhir Yusubov, a former resident of Kazan, Tatarstan. He had worked as a truck driver for 25 years, and was now a freelance delivery driver with his own truck. Two years ago, Yusubov moved to a small detached house in the Aviastroitelny suburb of Krasnodar in south Russia. 

On 6 October, Yusubov accepted a haulage job advertised on a popular Russian logistics site ATI.su, which has over 100,000 registered drivers, according to the Telegram channel Baza. The job involved picking up a mixed 21-ton load of 'packaging materials' from Armavir near Krasnodar for delivery to Simferopol, the capital of Crimea. What is said to be the online haulage contract, published by Baza, showed that the client was a limited company called TEK-34, based in Ulyanovsk in south Russia and listed as the number one most trusted haulage client of 370 registered in that city. It would be the first and last job Yusobov would do for TEK-34. According to Russian investigators quoted by the 112 channel, the advertisement was posted by a ATI.su user with the handle ‘Oleg’ and with a Moscow IP address. The haulage fee offered was a generous but not outrageous 48,000 rubles, or £694. The ad was online for around 15 minutes, and was taken down as soon as Yusubov accepted it.

Russian police who searched Yusupov’s computer found that he had checked TEK-34’s hundreds of positive reviews – but did not apparently notice that the most recent of them was in 2020, when the company was sold, according to Russia’s EGRYuL register of limited companies. But between its sale in 2020 and 6 October, 2022, TEK-34 did not post a single job or register any commercial activity, according to the 112 and BAZA reports. 

The truck that Yusubov drove had been re-registered to his nephew Samir because Mahir himself had gotten into trouble with the law after an earlier crash and didn’t want to lose his sole source of livelihood. Or so the nephew Samir himself claimed in a video he posted online explaining that he had nothing to do with the truck or the attack – adding that his parents’ apartment was being searched by the FSB and that he himself was abroad. According to Yusobov’s wife, her husband reported picking up the load, packed in pallets, at a 'completely normal' goods depot in Armavir on 7 October and set off on the 463 kilometre (287 mile), seven-hour first leg of his journey from Krasnodar to the Kerch bridge. 

Yusubov should, by rights, have crossed the bridge towards the evening of the 7 October: Vladimir Putin’s birthday. But instead he decided to stop in a lay-by and spend the night, as the delivery was not due in Simferopol until the next day. At dawn he rose, drove to Taman on the mainland Russian side of the Kerch Strait, passed through the electronic x-ray and explosive detectors. His truck had just drawn level with an apparently stationary train-load of oil tankers when his truck detonated, demolishing one of the two road bridge spans and setting the oil train on fire. Yusubov was killed in the blast, along with a couple from St Petersburg who were in a passenger car that was nearby. 

So far, so strange. But the really conspiratorial part comes next. According to other anonymous Telegram channels, the oil train was stationary on the bridge in contravention of regulations. Was it waiting for Yusubov’s truck to pass? And why were the tons of explosives in his truck not detected by the sophisticated machinery designed to prevent just such an attack? 

The obvious problem with this bizarre story is sourcing. The details are too complex and too specific to be anything but a leak from law enforcement or intelligence services. The question is, whose? And why, since the Telegram channels used to publicise the information are known to be not only pro-Russian but security service-linked, would Russian spooks be interested in publishing details that point to Moscow’s involvement, not Kyiv’s? 

If the attack was, in fact, organised by the Ukrainians, one can see why they would wish to distance themselves from it. A suicide bombing involving an unwitting patsy would not only be an act of state-sponsored terrorism; it would also be a cold-blooded murder unbecoming of a country whose main strength is its moral superiority. 

But if the attack was organised by the Russians – or, as he claims, by a faction of the Russian security state – then the war has entered a far more volatile and dangerous phase inside Russia than we ever could have imagined. For the moment, though, only two things are certain in this hall of mirrors: someone did blow up the bridge using a truck bomb and that someone was willing to kill the driver to do it.